Less Than Human (40 page)

No, no. That’s not
my
father. She stopped, both hands clutching her head. The biometal tips on her left hand felt warmer than her right fingertips.
Someone else’s memory. What memory had she left for Akita to capture?

“Hurry up.” Samael held the door impatiently. “I want you to see what will happen to your niece if you don’t try harder.”

A
t 5:00
P.M.
on Friday the Silver Angel vans were discovered burned out in a disused quarry, following satellite photos of the lonely
roads. Trafficams weren’t installed on country roads, unlike on the main highways and city roads; if the vans had been picked
up by one of these recording cameras first, the plate numbers would have automatically been correlated with information in
the national database, and the police might have picked up the occupants before they ran away.

The vans had been torched as early as 2:00
P.M.
They were still warm, but no longer burning. Footprints and motorbike tracks led away from the site.

A massive manned search spread out from the site: police, local volunteers, dogs, and Defense Force helicopters. Printouts
of satellite photos lay in drifts over the incident room like autumn leaves. They were investigating bikes parked at stations
within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for
the Betta attack.

No message arrived from the Silver Angels (the official record called them by their own name). The profilers said they were
probably regrouping and rethinking their options, and that there might possibly be internal dissension. Ishihara hoped they
were right. McGuire’s husband, before he left the station to go home and wait there, had said in his opinion the Angels were
preparing their next attack.

Ishihara grew grumpier as the evening wore on. Beppu commiserated with him on their lack of sleep and left him alone. At 9:00
P.M.
Funo sent him home with orders to report in at seven the next morning.

As he got in the train heading south, he decided to make a few inquiries on his own. He knew he was being stubborn and irrational.
But he had to follow up this feeling or he’d never live with himself.

He hadn’t explained it well to Funo, he knew. Why did he feel the Angels were in a town, the larger the better? Certainly
the country offered them more space to hide. Some rural areas hid hamlets and roads that hadn’t been used for decades. The
trouble with deserted roads, though, was that you were bloody obvious if someone
did
see you. In the old days rural folk might have ignored strange tourists and gone about their business, but the level of poverty
in the country now meant people were more likely to report strangers if they thought a reward might be offered.

In the city, on the other hand, you could do almost anything and people looked the opposite way, determined not to get involved.
It was almost like that old children’s game where one child chants “look this WAY,” and on the last word points in any direction.
The other child has to try to look in a different direction than the pointing finger.

He’d chased Harada the other day, for example, and nobody turned a hair, not even the old lady he’d almost fallen over. They
all made a great show of minding their own business.

As the train purred over the Yodo River bridge, he replayed the chase in his mind. Years ago his own clumsiness would have
made him cringe—now he simply filed it away as an embarrassing fact. He’d chased Harada and lost him. Harada wasn’t carrying
a phone and at that stage his data hadn’t been put into police tracking units. So they lost him until he turned up dead later
in Takamatsu.

And where did he disappear to when you chased him? asked Ishihara’s intuition smugly.

“Passenger-san, it’s the last stop. You have to get off here.”

He stared blankly at the stationmaster. The train waited, all its doors open and quite empty except for the two of them. The
lights glared in his eyes, which felt sore and grainy.

“This is the last station,” the stationmaster repeated patiently. “You have to get out here.”

Ishihara muttered an apology and staggered onto the platform. Immediately the doors swished shut, and the train moved off
with a derisive whoosh of hot air. The line of people waiting for the next train looked the other way politely.

He tried to focus on the timetable above the waiting room. The digital numbers flickered and blurred. He preferred the old
black-on-white letters. Where was he?

Tenpo-ji. Two stations away from where he lost Harada. Not far enough to bother waiting for the next train. He might as well
walk.

Outside, the night enveloped him in a humid embrace, a different world to the cool, white station below. Once a busy north-south
route, the street now carried only delivery trucks along the road itself. Far above, the skyway carried people from Bettas
to the inner city. One layer below that, the local monorail dropped workers off at the top floors of the buildings. Recently
formed companies took offices there, risky ventures that couldn’t afford inner-city rent. “Entertainment lounges”—brothels—and
loan companies, high-class bars, bookies … the buildings’ owners didn’t care who rented, providing the rooms stayed full.

The lower floors were crowded with cheap eateries, discount electronics, pachinko parlors, bars, pawnshops and cheap accommodation.
Ishihara couldn’t imagine living here, in the constant rumble from the street, the grime and dirt, the stink of garbage, constant
squall of karaoke, recorded messages, jingle-gurgle-thunk of pachinko machines, and the lurid false day of neons.

The road turned west, but the street continued south as a covered shopping mall. He’d chased Harada here, coming from the
opposite direction. Harada turned left into a side street heading west. Kireda 4-cho. On the corner there was a shoe shop.
Ishihara remembered the table of women’s shoes blocking the sidewalk. The mall’s shopcams then lost Harada as he left the
covered area.

Ishihara searched for the corner, glad of an excuse to slow his pace. The air dragged in his lungs, and sweat soaked his back
and underarms. Most of the shops in the mall were closed or in the process of closing. Betta shops ran all night with automated
purchasing systems. Here, tired women in aprons pulled metal shutters across the front of stores crowded with sidewalk displays
brought in for the night. Men stripped to their undershirts and loaded goods into crates and crates onto trucks.

The shoe shop had closed its shutters, but a streetlight illuminated the address on the side of the building opposite. This
was the corner.

The canyon of the side street had no lit canopy like the mall, but it was reasonably well lit, mainly by neons from a pachinko
parlor three floors above. In the grocery store near where he’d tripped, an old woman sat dozing at the cash register.

Harada had turned quickly left down a lane leading diagonally northwest and, while Ishihara picked himself up, disappeared
somewhere in the first twenty meters of that lane.

There were no entries for at least fifteen paces into the lane, only the concrete back of the storefronts. Ishihara distinctly
remembered how Harada turned to the right and grasped a door handle. But when the police investigated, they found an ordinary
aluminum-framed door, where me owner of the building had boarded over the alley beside his house to keep out thieves and rubbish,
but left a door to get in. The alley, said the local police report, led only to a blank wall that was the back of the building
in the next block. The back door of the house was kept locked at all times, and it had definitely been locked the previous
day, so if Harada had entered the alley and locked the door behind him, he should have been caught.

Either the owner of the house was lying—and the police had uncovered nothing to indicate this—or Harada didn’t go through
the door. Ishihara only took his eyes off the chase while he disentangled himself from the bicycle, Harada would have had
maybe twenty or thirty seconds. The local police had checked the few houses along this street, but nobody saw anything. They
also checked with the security company that watched a nearby unused milk factory and an abandoned scrap metal yard, but none
of their patrols had seen anyone suspicious that night.

The only place Harada could have gone was into a crack between buildings on the opposite side of the alley. The crack was
a good five paces away but barely wide enough to accommodate an adult’s body. The police had searched it, of course, but Harada
had a head start on them. He could have turned and squeezed through the crack, and got away while Ishihara wasted time trying
the door.

But where did Harada go after that? The police were watching train and bus stations all around the area.

The crack was a narrow dark space ending in a sliver of yellow streetlight. Ishihara squeezed into the alley, ignoring the
voice of common sense that told him to go around. Sure enough, the alley was concrete walls all the way, no entries on either
side, not even an air duct from either building. He emerged from the other end hot, irritated, and with something putrid stuck
to the bottom of his shoe.

A middle-aged man in undershirt and golf pants passed him on the other side of the street, trailing a small white dog on a
lead. The man stared unashamedly at Ishihara, who was trying to scrape his shoe on the gutter. Ishihara inclined his head
politely, and the man looked away at last.

Busybody. Why wasn’t he here staring the other day when Harada gave us the slip?

Across the road, the rusted metal of the old milk factory gates bled pink reflections of neon. The concrete block wall beside
it was nearly two meters tall and topped with short iron spikes. Harada might have dashed across the road from the alley,
but he couldn’t have scaled the wall and hidden inside. Even so …

He crossed the road and peered through the crack between the gates. The security company said they checked the old warehouse
and parking space regularly, which could mean every day or once a month. They said another company had bought the main building,
and they didn’t know anything about it, but it had been unused for the past year. They’d never seen lights on inside.

He could only see a dark expanse of concrete and the lower half of a shadowy building. What did he expect—a neat trail of
silver paint?

The chain on the gates wasn’t tight. He could push one side nearly far enough to squeeze in. As he squatted down to see if
the angle gave him a better view of the yard, he saw that somebody had squeezed in before him; two or three light-colored
threads were caught on the rough metal.

It might be nothing to do with the case, but the threads looked recent. Ishihara pulled a tiny plasbag from his wallet and
maneuvered the threads into it. One of them was stuck tight on the metal and, as he shoved the gate open farther with his
shoulder so that he could grasp the thread with his fingertips, he found himself half-inside the yard.

He sealed the bag and placed it carefully in his wallet and, still crouching, sidestepped the rest of the way into the yard.
The gate creaked back into place.

Weeds forced their way through cracked concrete under his feet. To his right, the windows in the back of a two-story building
were all dark, the bottom ones boarded shut. That must be the main building, which wasn’t on the security company’s books,
although the local police had confirmed that everything was locked up and secure. The warehouse stood in front of him, a barnlike
building, completely dark. If it had any windows, they weren’t clean enough to reflect the light. The only light in the yard
was a narrow strip across the concrete, from the lamp on the other side of the street. It made the rest of the yard seem even
darker.

There was a tiny torch on his phone, but the battery was too low to supply more than a pale blue glow. He padded across the
yard to the closest door of the warehouse, which was on the long side of the building facing him. There was another, smaller
door right in the corner.

No alarms sounded, no security company car pulled up at the gates.

The handle of the door turned quite easily, and silently. He hesitated, then decided caution took precedence over curiosity,
even if all he found was the local children’s hideaway stacked with comics. Better call the station.

First he slid the volume control on his phone right down then waited for someone in the incident room to answer. Beppu, he
assumed, had been sent home like himself.

The little screen lit up with an unfamiliar message.
The number you have called is out of range. Please readjust your position and try again.
Out of range? In downtown Osaka? Must be a mistake. He texted a quick message, left it to redial and pushed the door. It
stuck, then swung outward lightly. Ishihara pulled it open and stepped quickly inside, moving to the side of the door. He
stood, breathing as quietly as he could.

The warehouse smelled musty, and also pungent, like incense. His hand by his side rested on a wooden case, with cardboard
boxes beside it. He ran his fingers along the top of the boxes. There wasn’t much dust, and the tops weren’t sealed. He reached
inside the first one, found a smaller box big enough to hold in one hand. It weighed a lot for its size, and the contents
clicked together as they rattled around inside. The box opened at one end and smooth, cold cylinders fell into his hand.